Merchant Archive
Thread: Mail Lockup?
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Mystyrys
Fri Jul 23, 2004 4:22 pm
#1
Okay, I searched but couldn't find a topic that already mentioned this:
I logged in today, after about three days out of game, knowing I'd have a ton of vendor mails waiting for me. Vendor Sales and Auction Unsuccessful (hate rollover days). I relist a few hundred items, then go to delete selected mails. Every time I hit the delete button, the game completely locked up for about a minute or so. My cursor wouldn't even move.
Now I've had this many mails many times before. And deleting them one at a time does decrease my FPS from the usual 29 down to 1. The more mails I delete, my FPS climbs. Slowly. But I never locked up like that before. I couldn't even open the mail screen without locking up for that minute. Was this a fluke?
Anyway, frustrated after doing this about 6 times, I went ahead and did a /mailsave. It said I had 748 emails. Now I knew I wasn't about to sit there and lock up 700 times to get rid of only sales and rollover mails, so I sacrificed even the ones I usually keep with plans to replace them later, did a mass mail delete and went and finally downloaded Merchant's Friend to set up later too.
It was just a very frustrating day. I love being a master merchant, but this inundation of vendor mails thing is a real pain. Can't we please have a daily digest of sales and rollover mails instead? Just one mail listing all of each type? Would work for offers too?
Sorry. Just needed to vent a little bit. It was that or go execute all my vendors in the most vile manner imaginable.
I logged in today, after about three days out of game, knowing I'd have a ton of vendor mails waiting for me. Vendor Sales and Auction Unsuccessful (hate rollover days). I relist a few hundred items, then go to delete selected mails. Every time I hit the delete button, the game completely locked up for about a minute or so. My cursor wouldn't even move.
Now I've had this many mails many times before. And deleting them one at a time does decrease my FPS from the usual 29 down to 1. The more mails I delete, my FPS climbs. Slowly. But I never locked up like that before. I couldn't even open the mail screen without locking up for that minute. Was this a fluke?
Anyway, frustrated after doing this about 6 times, I went ahead and did a /mailsave. It said I had 748 emails. Now I knew I wasn't about to sit there and lock up 700 times to get rid of only sales and rollover mails, so I sacrificed even the ones I usually keep with plans to replace them later, did a mass mail delete and went and finally downloaded Merchant's Friend to set up later too.
It was just a very frustrating day. I love being a master merchant, but this inundation of vendor mails thing is a real pain. Can't we please have a daily digest of sales and rollover mails instead? Just one mail listing all of each type? Would work for offers too?
Sorry. Just needed to vent a little bit. It was that or go execute all my vendors in the most vile manner imaginable.
NJ62
Sat Jul 24, 2004 8:34 am
#2
I've had my entire game lockup from too much mail in my mailbox, and it's hard to delete items in your mailbox, when just opening the mailbox grinds the game to a halt. Now I just delete my "item purchased" e-mails and restock from what I think is missing. /shrug.
Elyssa
Sat Jul 24, 2004 8:52 am
#3
Were you deleting the messages one at a time or did you try doing a multi-select and deleting them all in one fell swoop?
Mystyrys
Sat Jul 24, 2004 9:10 am
#4
One at a time, as I read them, seeing what sold and needed restocked or relisted or replied to. Then I just got too frustrated and did a mass delete.
I'm on the City Council for the player city I am in. And a guild recruiter, militia, city factory manager, owner of all the merchant tents in the city -- I have a lot of emails I need to keep for forwarding purposes. (My notepad is full to capacity too). I get a lot of mail even without counting mail from 6 vendors. But it was all kinda disorganized after all this time, so I decided it was a good time to sacrifice it and start over anyway. So /mailsave and I will restore all those city info mails later. Or find a less cumbersome method for keeping them handy. I'd rather not have to tab out all the time to grab documents or play with my laptop beside me too.
Once I get this Merchant's Friend program set up, maybe it won't all be such a pain. But it's kind of sad that I have to use an outside program to organize my merchant stuff - ya know? 
LadyGrace
Sun Jul 25, 2004 7:53 am
#5
Did you sort the mail by category before the lockups started happening?
I also get lockups from over-full mail, but it seems that if I don't sort the mail to find something (i.e. press the From heading to find a mail from a certain person) I don't get the lock-ups, or at least not as often. As soon as I have sorted, my mail turns into a game-stopper until I've done a full re-log.
I also downloaded Merchant's Friend, but its constantly getting errors, the data is incomplete, and all the "cool" features don't seem to be working. Its probably something I'm doing wrong, but I've given up on it for nowand use the web-based SWG mail handler instead, its not as comprehenisve but its working for me.
Mystyrys
Sun Jul 25, 2004 9:37 am
#6
No. It was in default sort (date/time) when I did the first couple of deletes. Seeing the FPS drop was going to be magnitudes worse than usual this time, I sorted by subject, and tried again. Same thing. Total game lockup for at least a full minute.
Typically when I have that much mail to delete, it drops to 1 FPS, and just a flicker of lockup followed by lag as my FPS climbs back up to 29. After a few more deletions, FPS climbs with flicker lockups-lag from 2,3,4,5... and so on, until I get the mails pared down to only 100 or so, then my FPS levels out to a normal 29 with no lag between deletions. I've gotten used to that, and though annoying, consider it normal. That's sad. I'm resigned to normal being crappy. LOL.
Anyway. Guildmates suggested theories on what causes this mail lag or lockup. (Apparently this is a "silent ailment" that many suffer but don't talk about) Some said mail operations lag if you are in a "full" house. I was in a full house. And I was on Lok. So I moved to a location in the middle of nowhere and nothing. Delete. Lockup. I left Lok and went back to Tatooine. Again, tried a remote location. Delete. Lockup. Relogged. Lockup. Logged out for over an hour. Lockup. That was the point where frustration won and the saved city info mails were sacrificed to end my pain and suffering. (I'd never done a mail save or delete and had to ask in guild chat how to do that too. Grrr.)
And Merchant's Friend is difficult to make work right? Argh. That's bad news. I'm not all that computer literate. Not when it comes to programs or hardware. But I'm lucky. I just yell "Tech Support!" and my 17 year old son comes a-runnin' and "fixes it" for me. Usually with a warning like, "Never touch that button again Mom." So I guess I will let "Tech Support" do my Merchant's Friend" for me and hope it alleviates at least some of my email woes.
Thanks for the information y'all. I'll keep trying to figure this out. Or hope the Devs fix this kink in the system. Someday. Soon. Please. Before more vendors have to die.
Q
StarWorker
Sun Jul 25, 2004 11:52 am
#7
To the person with problems with Merchants Friend. There are a few types of emails that causes crashes:
Some mass mails cause crashes, and some mails with names spanning over multiple lines may cause crashes.
Make sure you have the latest version of merchants friend downloaded and installed (I think the most recent one is beta 0.12)
You can test whether a mail causes an error by having another folder besides your default swgmail folder where you copy over suspected emails. If merchant friends loads fine with the suspected email, its nothing wrong with the emails, if it crashes, you have narrowed it down.
Once you find out what types of emails cause a crash, its easy to delete them before doing a mailsave.
Once in a while, I do a /mailsave followed by a /deletemail (or was it /removemail, not sure).
This will save all your emails to your harddisk (still could wish for a program to easily browse them), and delete all emails in-game after that.
Message Edited by StarWorker on 07-25-2004 08:55 PM
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